Perfect for the most reluctant of readers, this book is a sure-fire hit.
—School Library Journal
Calame (Call the Shots) utilizes every juvenile humor trick in the book (body odor, flatulence, awkward sex jokes, regurgitation) to draw guilty laughter from Dan’s onslaught of shameful experiences. The result is coming-of-age by way of catastrophe.
—Publishers Weekly
Think Gary Paulsen meets Captain Underpants. Technology in the form of a perversely adapted Baby-Real-A-Lot (a lifelike doll that mimics a real baby), scatological and reproductive humor, and teenage boy sexual fantasies team up with tense backwoods situations to create a perfect middle-school read. Be prepared for lots of in-the-stacks snickering.
—Booklist
Calame’s Dan vs. Nature is sophomoric humor at its best. Tear-inducing guffaws abound on nearly every page. Both Dan and Charlie’s characters are beautifully fleshed out and perfectly complementary. Calame’s writing makes the reader a trio in their shenanigans by page five…Readers will need to know how things turn out for the friends they share so many laughs with.
—VOYA
The heavy-duty grossness, bawdy jokes, and the sesquipedalian banter between Charlie and Penelope make for a boy-friendly, nerd-friendly comedy that is more than a few notches above realism but never tips over into straight-up fantasy. The heartfelt confessions are not overly heartfelt, keeping any hint of sentimentalism at bay while acknowledging that there are good men out there who are worth a chance. This is thus the next step in the developmental sequence that tracks from Captain Underpants through the Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Guys Read series.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
For readers who like their stories laced with gross-out humor and teenage boy hi-jinks peppered with sexual situations, this book will fit the bill…the book’s humor is infused with real growth and the characters are likable.
—School Library Connection
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